Something really scary is going on in Germany • Hacker News Board

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#121

Post by netcan » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 11:27 AM UTC

richardjordan wrote: post #113

This ultimately comes down to the fact that newspapers are going out of business because not enough people want to buy them any more, and they're lashing out in desperation. I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways -…

I think the point that is unnoticed is that medium matters. More specifically, medium & distribution matter.

Mediums beget business models, not content. Game Of Thrones has business model closer to X Factor than to Avatar, because similarity of the medium is more important than similarity of the content.

The best way to see this is by looking at the history of porn, the content industry with negative lobbying power. Adult cinemas had the same business model as (and competed with) live shows. Certain types of content got produced. Then home videos changed it entirely. DDifferent types of content got produced for different people. Then DVD + online sales, changed the industry (growing it again). Then live streaming shrunk it.

Each time the medium & distribution changed the whole industry changed. Different producers, different consumers, different content, different size industry, different business model.

Online consumption of news media is not the same as dead tree. That is reality. All of the characteristics of the industry change when that happens. Douglas Adams said it best "It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply."

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#122

Post by richardjordan » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 11:30 AM UTC

schabernakk wrote: post #64

summerdown2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication…

Isn't the problem here that the benefit is not directly visible? Same reason there is still no global agreement on a proceeding against global warming. There is no doubt that you need a functioning, diverse and independent press for a functioning democracy. So indirectly everyone (corporations as well) benefits from this institution. In germany we have a couple public tv stations which are financed through a fee ever…

You appear to be arguing that we should subsidize businesses for which the market rate for their product is virtually zero. The idea that what's in the interests of big media companies and their owners is somehow in the interests of the creative talent (think - do musicians outside a tiny number of stars have any negotiating position with record giants?) and that that is in turn somehow in the interests of society just doesn't follow for me. Every industry that fails makes the same argument - the public should pay to save us (and you are paying if as a Google customer you are forced to have your services restricted because Google has to pay to subsidize these failed businesses). But just as the piano sheet music industry was successfully replaced by the recording industry, new industries rise and replace old ones and meet the demands of the market. Just because we cannot see what that future is - because if we could we'd be building it and be billionaires doing so - doesn't mean it won't happen.

Twitter's coverage of the Arab Spring was better than any Western media in the early days... food for thought.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#123

Post by digeridoo » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 11:40 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #102

I'm very disappointed with Europe. There is a trend of idiotic legislation drafted, & voted on by people who don't really understand the implications. They just don't understand the internet & technology enough and/or aren't smart enough. It' embarrassing. The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie policy" popups tha…

Not all bad. http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neu...

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#124

Post by stdbrouw » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 12:16 PM UTC

leoh wrote: post #26

schabernakk wrote: post #3

To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority. Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some ti…

"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists." Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in…

> I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6.

Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.

By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.

(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#125

Post by stdbrouw » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 12:24 PM UTC

dexen wrote: post #106

Shish2k wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the publishers never gave permission to use their content > Yes they did, yes they did. The publisher explicitly granted access I'm failing to see how "read access" and "license to redistribute for profit" are the same thing

That's a strawman; the bots never indicated intention to read. They indicated (via `User-Agent' header) intention to index content and got HTTP 200 OK response to that . Nothing in the HTTP protocol specs (RFC 2616) even suggests it is only meant for direct human consumption. To the contrary, it states, user agent The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers, editors, spiders (web-traversing robots)…

If I don't lock my house, that doesn't give you the right to break in. You're absolutely right that publishers could make more use of the tools at their disposal to protect their content in whatever way they wish, but they have rights regardless of whether they do.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#126

Post by b1daly » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 12:35 PM UTC

I think the intuition behind these proposed laws is that Google has become so dominant in providing the information substrate of society that it should be subject to regulation as a monopoly. The argument would be something along the lines that search works best when provided as one comprehensive resource. Therefore, as a natural monopoly it should be regulated for similar reasons that other utilities are (electricity, water). The publishers are trying to make a case that their product has value as a "public good." Classical economic theory says market forces alone will produce a sub-optimal supply of a public good with out regulation.

Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the creators can't.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#127

Post by dexen » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:01 PM UTC

stdbrouw wrote: post #125

dexen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strawman; the bots never indicated intention to read. They indicated (via `User-Agent' header) intention to index content and got HTTP 200 OK response to that . Nothing in the HTTP protocol specs (RFC 2616) even suggests it is only meant for direct human consumption. To the contrary, it states, user agent The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers, editors, spiders (web-traversing robots)…

If I don't lock my house, that doesn't give you the right to break in. You're absolutely right that publishers could make more use of the tools at their disposal to protect their content in whatever way they wish, but they have rights regardless of whether they do.

This analogy only muddles the picture. We are talking about private property, but not a home, more like a shop or pub.

Its only raison d'etre is to serve certain guests. We are talking about a commercial server that is managed by a professional admin, and is explicitly open to only some of the public, and it already screens and filters guests, based on various criteria. For example, the server may disallow hotlinking of images, serve some content only upon receipt of a HTTP cookie confirming payment and serve different content for mobile devices, some movies blocked in certain countries, based on IP geolocation. The decision is based on HTTP request data and will of the owner, encoded as server's configuration. Ask yourself, how much different is Google News bot?

How about this analogy instead: ``if I hire a professional bouncer for my high-street shop, and the bouncer stops some people from entering and lets others in, that doesn't mean those let in can indeed walk in''?

Which would be crazy, and press would have a field day with such a shop.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#128

Post by jrogers65 » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:18 PM UTC

durbin wrote: post #29

Belgian papers sued Google a few years ago over similar uses of their content. It sort of backfired on them when google stopped crawling their pages. The internet and Google are more powerful than the German print media. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-a...

That's only half of the story:

> AllThingsD reports that Google has now re-indexed newspapers in the Copiepresse group. This is the right move and also a very self-interested one by Google. If it were to “punish” publishers that didn’t want to be included in Google verticals (e.g., News, Places, Shopping) antitrust investigators would use that as evidence against the company.

http://searchengineland.com/beligian-newspapers-claim-retali...

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#129

Post by netcan » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:53 PM UTC

digeridoo wrote: post #123

netcan wrote: post #102

I'm very disappointed with Europe. There is a trend of idiotic legislation drafted, & voted on by people who don't really understand the implications. They just don't understand the internet & technology enough and/or aren't smart enough. It' embarrassing. The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie policy" popups tha…

Not all bad. http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neu...

Thanks. It's relevant though that nothing like this is likely to come from the EU itself.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#130

Post by ajuc » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

schabernakk wrote: post #3

To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority. Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some ti…

After last few years here in Poland I've stopped believing in good reporting. No matter what you say, press is going to present it the way it wants, and it's impossible to break the glass and say to public what you really want. If there's order to show you're stupid, you will look stupid, no matter what you say. If there's order to show you're great - you will look and sound great.

I wish traditional massmedia fast demise. There's nothing there worth saving at this point.